Wine Wednesdays: Križ Grk 2017 super-rare orange wine 🧡

19 Dec, 2018

People say that the new luxury in wine are hyper-local wines with tiny production runs and hard-to-get allocations. If that’s the case, move over Romanée-Conti and Pétrus, and enter Križ Grk (pronounced “gerkh”).

We’ve written before about Denis (the guy on the right) and his awesome biodynamic Plavac Mali, which, by the way, is also back in stock. But this time we have something even more special for you.

Grk is an obscure, almost endangered, and also possibly our favorite white grape variety. Not only does it not have any vowels, but it also only has female flowers. This means it needs another variety growing beside it in the vineyard, usually Plavac Mali which blossoms roughly at the same time.

Like a great chaperone, Denis takes the fruit of this romance, and does as little with it as possible. He lets it ferment with its natural yeasts. He lets it macerate for a week on the skins. And he doesn’t filter it nor add any sulphites.

The result is a wine with soul. Honey, citrus, smoke, nuts, herbs … weighty and complex but still accessible and totally delicious. The only problem is that there’s only 1,000 bottles per year, and Denis prefers to drink it in his cellar with his friends rather than sell it.

When we first met him last year he gave us a grand total of 3 bottles. We drank them ourselves during our birthday trip to Sri Lanka. Then his Grk started winning various wine of the year awards and we knew we had to dig deep to find all the charm we could muster to have a chance of getting another allocation.

After a year of messages, emojis, and cute animated GIFs, we’re proud to say we got a whole case this year! And because we like you so much, this time we’ll share. Catch it if you can. One bottle per customer please. Or be romantic and get a Grk and a Plavac.